La Cascade Du Chocolat to revive a tradition in downtown Exeter

Thursday

Jun 29, 2017 at 2:04 PMJun 29, 2017 at 2:05 PM

By Brendon Burnsnewsletter@seacoastonline.com

EXETER — Master chocolatier Samantha Brown and chocolatier Tom Nash will soon be sweetening Exeter a bit with the opening of their “chocolate house.” La Cascade Du Chocolat is expected to open July 15 at 109 Water St. to coincide with the annual Independence Day Festival.

"Historically, colonial chocolate houses were places where people would come to talk about ideas, big and small,” Brown said. “We want to revive that tradition and be a real center of the community."

Brown said that education and teaching for all ages is going to be a huge part of what they plan to do with the chocolate house. Nash and Brown are writing their own curriculum for a program that will get people from whatever skill level they are at to a certified chocolatier. They will also teach classes about truffle making, tempering, and caramel making.

Tempering is the process of heating the chocolate, pouring it onto the granite countertop, moving it around for a while to keep it in a liquid state, and pouring it into the selected bowl molding for the creation of chocolate to begin.

According to Brown, tempering chocolate is all about temperature because chocolate is a six-phase polymorphic crystalline structure.

“Otherwise, it won’t set up, won’t snap, won’t be shiny, or won’t feel good in your mouth,” Brown said.

Brown said that after the chocolate is placed in the bowl, she raises the temperature two degrees Celsius. If it goes over two degrees, she is forced to start over again.

There will be a ten-foot-long glass window that will gives viewers walking downtown and customers sitting outside at the café tables a look at the intensive process of making gourmet chocolate.

During the summer months, La Cascade Du Chocolat will offer chocolate drinks, where the chocolate is iced, melted in hot water for five hours, chilled overnight, taken back out of the refrigerator and blended. The unsolidified cocoa butter is then strained out, and put over ice as a drinkable chocolate bar.

Brown said that they will also be offering chocolate flights, which experiment with the nuances of different flavors of chocolate from all around the world, such as from Ghana and Madagascar.

“Like wine, chocolate tastes very different depending on where you get it in the world,” Brown said. “And chocolate actually has three times the number of flavor profiles than wine.”

Brown said that depending what temperature the chocolate was cooked at and the length of time that it was cooked it will dramatically change the blending of flavor for the chocolate maker. She said a chocolate flight could feature chocolate from three different countries that could all be dark chocolate, but that the difference in taste would be noticeable among the three used.

“People think chocolate is chocolate. I did until I started actually learning about it and I was like, ‘wow, chocolate is really neat,'" Brown said.

Brown pursued her passion for chocolate for 10 years taking classes in France and Italy, and studying with Ecole Chocolat in Vancouver, Canada. She simultaneously earned her master’s degree in education from Southern New Hampshire University.

“I didn’t realize that manipulating chocolate was such a science and art,” Darren Winham, the town of Exeter Economic Development Director, said. “I’m confident the chocolate house will be popular with the public and blend well with our downtown commercial mix.”

According to Winham, Brown is the second New Hampshire master chocolatier.

"Great chocolate only comes from practice working with it and using the highest quality ingredients,” Brown said. “We prefer to source local, non-GMO, organic products to match the quality of the chocolate we use. By knowing where the ingredients come from, we can make sure our bonbons, truffles, bars, and chocolate drinks are the highest quality.”

La Cascade du Chocolate has been awarded gold medals in four categories by the International Chocolate Salon.

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